Saturday, December 8, 2012

Obama's Murder Memos

When its critics looked to define
everything they saw as wrong with the Bush Administration, they frequently
turned to the so-called “Torture Memos”.Penned by John Yoo, now unaccountably a Law professor at UC Berkeley,
these memos represented a calculated effort to take advantage of a crisis
situation to re-interpret executive power and privilege.Needless to say, that reinterpretation tended
towards a dramatic expansion and abuse of that power.Specifically, Yoo played a crude game,
redefining torture and narrowing the application of legal protections as they
obtained to those who found themselves in conflict with the United States,
whether through their actions or through being caught up in the often-indiscriminate
dragnet constructed by our military and intelligence services as we invaded
first Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Conyers: “I didn’t ask you if you ever
gave him advice, I asked you do you think the President could order a suspect
buried alive?”

Yoo: “Mr Chairman, my view right now, is
I don’t think that a President would—no American President would ever have to
order that or feel it necessary to order that”.

Conyers: “I think we understand the games
that are being played”.

Indeed.Citizens of what is ostensibly a democracy of some sort are being asked
to accept the notion that in moments of “emergency” (and this is an emergency
which has dragged on for eleven sorry years, and shows no sign of abating, as
President Obama expands the war with greater vigour—if less outright enthusiasm
and an equal lack of forethought—than his predecessor to “fronts” all around
the world), rights go out the window.In
an “emergency”, be it a moment like 9/11 or the “forever war” declared in the
following months, we are required to debase ourselves as a people, trample on
the very same rights we trumpet as we go to war, and engage in the most heinous
of acts against our so-called enemies.

We are asked, in effect, to accept as a
measure of good faith that our national security apparatus—an apparatus which has
practised torture, murder, assassination, the surveillance of American
citizens, the manufacture of evidence for multiple wars—would not misuse these
powers which they don’t even bother to ask that they be granted, but instead cook
up in back rooms with the aid of their lawyers.It’s as if a known and convicted murderer came to you and asked that you
allow him access to deadly weapons, promising that he or she would not use
them.It’s like a financial industry
causing an economic crisis and then asking that you relax the regulations on
them.Or like an energy industry taking
advantage of poor oversight and then, through carelessness, causing an
environmental and social disaster, and then coming to ask you to weaken said
regulations further.

Upon being elected, the President
repeatedly reiterated that his administration would be “the most open and
transparent in history”.He even issued
a Memorandum
for the Heads of Executive Departments
and agencies on the subject of “Transparency and Open Government”, reiterating
his commitment to “creating an unprecedented level of openness in
Government.We will work together”, it
went on to read, “to ensure the public trust and establish a system of
transparency, public participation, and collaboration.Openness will strengthen our democracy and
promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government”.

The administration’s logic, according
to those who saw Obama’s Murder Memo,
threw these supposedly sacred laws under one bus after another, relentlessly
mowing down legal protections on the basis that in wartime, anything, anywhere
goes.

This, at least, is the general
thrust.We cannot know precisely what
the Murder Memo authorises, because the President has chosen to hide the
rationale behind his frightful violence from the public.If the rights to which the President pays an
increasingly-hypocritical lip service in virtually every public utterance are really
so important, surely he could at least dignify the public—the public which
elected him—with an explanation of why he sees the need to take the law into
his own hand and give himself the power to kill American citizens without
defending a change in the law before Congress.

Perhaps the President could even dignify
us with an explanation of his more comprehensive thinking about national
security.If he is prepared to act on
the idea that national security trumps public rights, surely that is a fitting
topic for a national address.If he is
prepared to argue that the killing of people, the destruction of
infrastructure, the assassination of individuals, and the overthrow of
governments by using armed drones is not war, thereby evading Congressional oversight,
then perhaps he could say this publicly to the nation.If he is prepared to endorse a system in
which a whistleblower is tortured on a brig and kept away from his lawyers for
months, but CIA personnel who murdered prisoners in their custody walk free,
perhaps he could include a reference to this in his State of the Union
Address.If he is prepared to persecute
wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and contemplate expanding his War of
Terror to Mali, perhaps his pollsters—who drive so much of Presidents’ thinking
these days—could at least ask people what they think about their country going
to war on a permanent basis against an ephemeral enemy in a manner calculated
to imperil the public interest.

We have been at war on a
steadily-expanding number of fronts for increasingly-opaque purposes since
9/11.In waging these wars, we have
effectively entered a kind of tunnel as one country, and will emerge as an
altogether different one.We have
performed wicked deeds, and condoned unspeakable acts.Because they continue to take place in the
dark, we can’t quite tell what they were, and I doubt that we shall ever know
the full extent of the killing that’s been done in these wars.The prisons, torture chambers, rendition
flights, dirty deals, weapons sales, kidnappings, and murders will never be
fully documented.But the story of our
descent into this pit will be more complete if we demand that our elected
leaders explain the basis on which we are making these decisions.But I suspect that the President knows that
his moral contortions would prove too much for the public, and that he would
risk severe censure if his machinations ever became transparent.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.